The Pandora Papers (or Pandora Papers) scandal has been making the whole planet speak since this Sunday, October 3, when the leak of thousands of names of people and companies that have millions in tax havens came to light.
The disclosure, similar to that exposed by the same group of journalists in 2016 with the famous Panama Papers, is in all the world’s media, since it names people of international importance, from sports celebrities (such as Angel Di María) to artists (Shakira), going through politicians and businessmen.
In Mexico, there are Julio Scherer, former legal adviser to the Presidency; Jorge Arganis Díaz Leal, Secretary of Communications and Transportation; Armando Guadiana (senator), and Julia Abdala, partner of Manuel Bartlett, head of the Federal Electricity Commission.
However, what are tax havens is one of the questions that many are asking at the moment, in the same way that they did a few years ago, when the Panama Papers were known.
This is a good summary that the graphic editor did Javier Zarracina and the reporter Alvin chang, both collaborators in Vox, at that time and that now serves to explain the Pandora Papers.
It is explained in a very simple way, with a very plain text and basic cartoons.
In reality, Zarracina and Chang only edited content that already existed: they took an explanation that had been written on Reddit by Dan gliesack and they added some editing and images to it.
1- Let’s say you keep all your money in your room, in a box that you use as a piggy bank. You keep it on a shelf above the closet.
2- Your mother knows it and every certain amount of time, open the box and check that everything is in order (your mother would be the State). You don’t like this, right?
3- What are you doing? You find a new box, an additional one, and put most of your money there. It’s a different piggy bank than the one your mother knows. And of course, you don’t say anything to her.
4- Also, you take the extra box to Johnny’s house.
5- Johnny’s mother is always very busy with other things. He never checks what’s in Johnny’s room. Actually, he is not interested in what Johnny does. So you can keep your box there, secret, without anyone noticing what you put or take out.
6- Other children in the city realize that it is a good idea and do the same. They put their savings in Johnny’s closet, away from their mothers’ sight. And Johnny starts getting paid to guard his neighbors’ boxes. Thus, for years.
7- But one day, at Johnny’s house they find the boxes. There were already too many boxes that Johnny has.
8- Upset, they call parents from all over the world to tell them about the children who hide their money.
9- That is basically the leak of Pandora Papers documents: many very important and powerful people who hid their boxes in Johnny’s house, in tax havens, so that their own states (their mothers) do not know about their true earnings. Of course most were doing nothing wrong to get the money. Strictly speaking, they just want privacy (and evade a few dollars). But not all are like that. Your neighbor, Michael, was stealing the money from his mother’s purse and was also hiding it in Johnny’s closet. And Jacob, who was stealing money from other people and didn’t want his parents to know where he came from.
10- But all those who hid their piggy bank in Johnny’s house, in one way or another, are in trouble, because banking secrets are not allowed in their houses.
11- These days, hundreds of journalists are looking at the records of Johnny’s house to better understand what kind of activity those who used Johnny’s house in Panama were collecting the money with. Whether it was legal or not.
In Google searches both in Mexico and in the rest of the world, Pandora Pepers is among the biggest trends. “Pandora papers”, “offshore”, “pandora papers list”, “julio scherer” and “panama papers mexico” experienced strong punctual increases, according to Google Trends. Also “Shakira” and “tax haven”.